Seatrain Lines, the operating name for the Over-Seas Shipping Company, began intermodal container shipping by using entire loaded rail cars between ports in the United States and Havana, Cuba, with the first shipment in December 1928 aboard a specially designed ship, Seatrain. This original ship, built at Swan Hunter & Wigham Richardson, Newcastle and later renamed Seatrain New Orleans, was capable of carrying 95 fully loaded rail cars. The loading system consisted of a cradle that fit into a dep...

Great stack insignia too. All the good ones are gone. American carriers that is not stack insignias.

Gas Turbines are complicated. They can never be the basic propulsion systems unless Daddy has a lot of money.

That’s a load of horsepucky … they might be described by some as complex but they are far from complicated. Even the complexity is debatable when compared to a diesel electric or CP propulsion system.

There are probably hundreds of GT vessels including yachts and ferries running all over the world without problems and operated by less than superhumans. They certainly do not require the same number of hours of maintenance required by other propulsion systems.

The reason GT systems haven’t taken over the world is because they are only commercially competitive when operated at or near maximum output. I think you have drunk too much of the popular press Kool-Aid.

Gas turbines that are rugged enough for ships drink lots of fuel. Push the start button, and it starts up. If it doesn’t, call the contractor…or swap it out for another one.

Exactly what I noticed in the fleet… no argument that the Navy is somehow more technically savvy because they operate gas turbines. I would even argue that maintenance we would consider fairly basic is contracted out on US Navy ships, or done with a tech rep or outside agency assisting. This is huge, and is due to numerous reasons, not least of all considering that actually being GOOD at your primary JOB (rating) has almost no bearing on EVALS and ADVANCEMENT but community service hours and MWR surely does. Crazy. There are other reasons too.

The vast majority of those engines are aero-derivitaves, they are marinized versions of aircraft engines. They are not big hunks of rugged iron and steel, they are not very different than what you see out an airliner window, they just use the exhaust differently and don’t use a fan drive. They drink no more fuel than any other marine engine when operating at max power, it is at low power where the consumption figures make them uneconomical for most commercial operations.

Off topic but the USCG built the Reliance class in 1964 and Hamilton Class Cutters in 1965. Both classes had combined diesel / gas turbine.

Heh… Yeah, and the Nigerian Navy is still cussing the purchase of the USCGC Chase after they burned through their entire annual fuel budget in a couple days. Never left the dock that I saw for the remainder of my time in Onne.

This is huge, and is due to numerous reasons, not least of all considering that actually being GOOD at your primary JOB (rating) has almost no bearing on EVALS and ADVANCEMENT but community service hours and MWR surely does. Crazy. There are other reasons too.

Starting to change now, thankfully.

Though of course there will always be some emphasis on collateral duties, at least we’re moving in the right direction with it.

The vast majority of those engines are aero-derivitaves, they are marinized versions of aircraft engines. They are not big hunks of rugged iron and steel, they are not very different than what you see out an airliner window, they just use the exhaust differently and don’t use a fan drive.

I don’t disagree, but I would believe that the GE lm2500 is the most widely used model on ships. There are newer generations (LM2500+g4 being the latest) that have greatly improved efficiencies, but many in service are the old ones that love the fuel. The LM6000 is more efficient, but I’m not sure it’s used for propulsion, just land based generation.

Also, the lm2500 is derived from the old CF6 engine (1970’s). Maybe they’ll soon make a LM based off the GEnx?!!?!

Firstly, just because the US Navy has suffered two mishaps doesn’t mean that the service is full of blithering idiots.

2 Mishaps?

USS Antietam, grounded 1/31/17
USS Lake Champlain, Collision 5/9/17

Plus the The Fitz and the John McCain, so that makes 4 just this year, and you would contend there are no institutional improvements to be made?

USS Porter, USS Guardian, USS Port Royal…

Obviously we are staring at the same picture, but seeing something different. I would never state that the service is full of blithering idiots or even allude to that. It is; however, fairly obvious that there has been a de-emphasis upon seamanship and watchstanding. Any change in that regard came from, and can only be rectified from the top. There needs to be a cultural paradigm shift. It’s tantamount to teaching someone everything there is to know about the Weapon System of a B-2 Bomber, but not teach them to fly the aircraft.

And to be clear, I love the U.S. Navy. It just seems fairly obviously with the rise of technicians, and specialists, and box checking-ticket punching paths to advancement, the foundation has been lost. The pride and priority of being a mariner. What good is any weapon system, if you can’t get to the engagement and then safely home again? It isn’t as if these warships were in an engagement, or training maneuvers, or unrepping, or any sort of elevated risk scenario…just transiting in and out of Port…ymmv.

Updated thought: I DO think the Navy will get a handle on this and take steps to rectify the issue. The first step to fixing a problem is recognizing you have one.

stupid me…all this time i assumed things were happening old school on the bridge already.

Depends on the ship. Most of the ships I’ve been on run manual mo-board solutions on contacts the radar tells us will CPA close in. They’ve also done manual nav fixes when in tight or restricted waters, instead of just relying on the GPS / gyros.

We’ve had TAD people and shipriders who just look at us incredulously like “Y’all still do all that shit manually?”

I’ve always been surprised that others don’t, because what happens if the systems go down?